Gas Prices

Quote: SOOPOO

I guess in your travels you haven't been paying much attention to the news.....

Come on, Ed!!!! prices do not depend on the exact amount of oil/gas/natural gas we have at an exact moment, but rather on policies that will influence those commodities. Have you heard of the pipeline project he shut down? Come on.....

That leaky thing that's an environmental disaster?
You are depending on that?
It's just a fraction of supply
The price is set by worldwide supply and demand, not some leaky pipe

Quote: ams288

He had his chance last fall. He didn’t do it. It probably cost him the election.

Trump was behind in the polls as early as 2018.

He could have cured Covid, ended climate change, defeated the Martian invaders, and he still would have lost the race. He lost because mail in ballots increased Black voter participation 20% above the usual 65%. There are 30 million eligible Black voters, and 90 percent of their votes went to Biden. That alone gave Biden a 20 to 21 million vote head start.

DeSantis will likely lose in Florida next year, and Abrams will likely win in Georgia for the same reason.

Quote: terapined

??????
What particular Biden policy overrode supply and demand that actually determine prices?
He's only been President for like 5 min

People tend to naturally assume that the President is solely responsible for anything that happens economically. I wouldn't worry about it. I think it's pretty clear that President Biden was personally responsible for the situation in Texas which is one (of innumerable) factors influencing the uptick in fuel prices.

Quote: Evenbob

It's just getting started. Wait till
it's $4 a gallon all over the
country. Most Uber/Lyft
drivers weren't driving rideshare
when Obummer was president.
All they've known is super cheap
gas under Trump. They will be
screaming bloody murder when
the new normal kicks back in.

I imagine not since Obama had already briefly been in office before Uber was even founded.

Quote: Tanko

Trump was behind in the polls as early as 2018.

He could have cured Covid, ended climate change, defeated the Martian invaders, and he still would have lost the race. He lost because mail in ballots increased Black voter participation 20% above the usual 65%. There are 30 million eligible Black voters, and 90 percent of their votes went to Biden. That alone gave Biden a 20 to 21 million vote head start.

DeSantis will likely lose in Florida next year, and Abrams will likely win in Georgia for the same reason.

???????
Republicans doing well in FL
Who's going to beat DeSantis
How can Abrams win when GA just passed a law making it harder to vote
Shouldn't Republicans make the tent bigger and include Blacks
Why make the tent smaller by censuring anybody against Trump
Is loyalty to Trump the party now?
How can you attract Black voters when the party is Trump, a racist

Quote: Tanko

Trump was behind in the polls as early as 2018.

He could have cured Covid, ended climate change, defeated the Martian invaders, and he still would have lost the race. He lost because mail in ballots increased Black voter participation 20% above the usual 65%. There are 30 million eligible Black voters, and 90 percent of their votes went to Biden. That alone gave Biden a 20 to 21 million vote head start.

DeSantis will likely lose in Florida next year, and Abrams will likely win in Georgia for the same reason.

I tend to think he would have won if not for Covid. He could have made some inroads with Moderates and Independents with a unifying message and chose not to do so. It's not like he lost by a ton in the states he needed.

As far as the Black vote goes, maybe counting on a significant percentage of the population of eligible voters to simply not vote isn't the best strategy going forward.

Didn’t he do better with black and Hispanic voters in 2020 than he did in 2016?

It was the moderate white voters who turned on him!

That’s why the Dems chose Biden. Someone those voters could feel comfortable with. Those voters wouldn’t have gone for Bernie or Warren.

Quote: ams288

Didn’t he do better with black and Hispanic voters in 2020 than he did in 2016?

It was the moderate white voters who turned on him!

That’s why the Dems chose Biden. Someone those voters could feel comfortable with. Those voters wouldn’t have gone for Bernie or Warren.

"Doing better," doesn't necessarily accomplish anything for him.

If this can be believed:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters/

It says that 91% of Black voters went for Hillary Clinton in 2016 compared to 6% for Donald Trump.

This source would have it 88% to 8%, so we can see there's a pretty significant difference:

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37922587

This source has black turnout at 59.6% in the 2016 Election, for a total of 16.4 Million Black voters.

Let's split the difference in the first two sources and give Clinton 89.5% and Trump 7% of the black vote. We get:

Clinton 16.4 * .895 = 14.678M votes

Trump 16.4 * .07 = 1.148M votes

Difference: 13.53M

Okay, so now we take a look at the 2020 numbers:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-president.html

With this, we see that Biden got 87% of black votes compared to 12% for Trump. We also see that 13% of all voters were black.

According to Wikipedia, a total of 158,383,403 votes were cast, which means some 20.59M of those came from black voters. Assuming the percentages are correct:

Biden: 20.59 * .87 = 17.9133M votes

Trump: 20.59 * .12 = 2.4708M votes

Difference: 15.4425M votes

I rounded a bit, but the point stands that getting a slightly higher percentage of a significantly bigger raw number is actually going to hurt you in raw numbers when one percentage is still dwarfing the other.

Hispanic vote was 65% Clinton and 29% Trump. It seems that Hispanics were 9.2% of voters in 2016, so that works out:

136,669,237 * .092 = 12573569

Clinton: 12573569 * .65 = 8,172,820

Trump: 12573569 * .29 = 3,646,335

Difference: 4,526,485

2020 Trump improved to 32% with Biden holding steady at 65%. Latinos were around 13% of all voters that time (it seems like the ones who didn't vote in 2016 could be presumed to have largely come out for Trump!)

Biden: 20.59 * .65 = 13.3835M

Trump: 20.59 * .32 = 6.5888M

Difference: 6.7947M

Conclusion

Quite simply, Trump's percentages can improve in demographic voter categories whilst his opponent's stay the same or get slightly worse, but it's still not going to help him in raw numbers when you have more voters.

It looks good for him on an, "All else equal," basis, but all else was not equal. There were more than 21M additional voters in 2020 compared to 2016, so even if you're getting dwarfed in a voter category by a slightly lesser percentage, it still kills you in the raw numbers. This is especially true when the two categories mentioned combine for more than 50% of the increased overall turnout in raw numbers.

In the meantime, as a percentage of the voting population, White voters dropped by more than 5% nationally between 2016 and 2020...not raw number, but as a percentage of total voters. Generally speaking, White voters somewhat favor Trump...but their turnout in raw numbers didn't increase as much relative to 2016 compared to other demographics.

In any event, it's pretty clear that more blacks and Hispanics voting is generally bad news for Republicans. Thus, my point stands. It works if the overall percentage of those categories you are getting goes up AND overall turnout (raw votes) stays basically the same.

EDIT TO ADD: The reverse of this is also a large part of the reason why Clinton lost in 2016 and Obama won reelection in 2012.

TL:DR Summary: Would you rather have 87% of 20.5M or 89.5% of less than 16.5 million? (This by itself doesn't make the point; it just highlights a component of the above post)

AAA follows gas prices very closely
According to AAA
2 reasons gas prices up
OPEC actions
And
The Texas freeze
No mention of Biden or a single leaky pipeline
It's sad that Trumpers are desperate to blame Biden for anything.
There was no TDS, all legitimate criticism
There is clearly BDS here. Criticism based solely on BS